2 . Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

The first of January was dedicated by the Romans to their God of Gates and Doors, Janus. A very old Italian God, Janus has a distinctive artistic appearance in that he is commonly depicted with two faces...one regarding what is behind and the other looking toward what lies ahead. Thus, Janus is representative of contemplation on the happenings of an old year while looking forward to the new. Some sources claim that Janus was characterized in such a peculiar fashion due to the notion that doors and gates look in two directions. Therefore, the God could look both backward and forward at the same time. Originally, Janus was portrayed with one bearded face and the other clean-shaven, which may have symbolized the moon and the sun, or age and youth. Later, he is most often shown with beards on both faces and frequently holds a key in his right hand. Very early statues of Janus (around the Second Century B.C.) depict him with four faces.

>>14500Fuck, haha, yea, and the pagan version easter was even called "Eostre"!

The pagan traditions, and there were many, were steeped in the folk knowledge of their societies, and contained the entire cultural intellectual wealth of agriculture and natural systems and early attempts at sciences and the histories of entire peoples over millenia. ...all lost when Rome recognized the wealth of the jews and allowed their cult of urban civilization, itself lifted from ancient Egypt, after many centuries of coexistence, to bulldoze the pagan faiths into obscurity with the founding of modern christianity, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to christianity pre-rome.

The shit everyone celebrates, and millions of unthinking plebs still believe in literally to this day, is the actual mashup of all the wealthiest and most powerful and hardest to eradicate cults in Rome circa 325AD, when Constantine the evil fucking genius realized he could get them all to quit warring in the streets if he forced their leaders at spearpoint to unite their bullshit and present it as the new official Roman religion in which all have a part, and turn Roman citizens aggression outward to the world, instead of inward at each other. It was hastily done, and it shows in the embarrassing sloppiness of the Bible itself. But he was right, and the Bible was good enough, and the wealthy Jews got their first 5 books in, right up front, and it worked well enough to convince most of the people most of the time, and thus spread out on the edge of a sword, via crusades and endless coups and boody revolutions for nearly 2000 years, long enough that the political establishment saw it as its way to insulate its power from of the rising and falling of governments, and shifted its position to the seat of the church, where they continue to rule over the minds and beliefs of a devoted empire of two billion people to this day. The Roman Empire didn't fall and disappear, it just changed slightly, from being your governmental taxman to your divine taxman. A third of the world now count themselves among its citizens, regardless of their country of birth or residence, and value nothing as high as they value that ethereal citizenship.

THAT is how you build a motherfucking timeless empire to end all empires.

>>14500Just wait til OP discovers that those people did not think of "gods" in the same simplistic way judeo-christian people think of their gods today.

These pagan faiths were nearly all based upon provincial combinations of observable natural phenomena such as astronomy, climate, seasonal weather patterns, and animal migrations, plus folk corollary, for the practical purpose of trying to plan and schedule critical human activities around those events hoping for the best success.

This is detritus in the wake of the development of human intelligence. This approach bore astrology, it bore teamwork and competitiveness and specialization, it bore ritual, and countless myths of varying degrees of effectiveness, it also bore anthropomorphism, it bore supernatural powers and spirits, and supernatural beings, supernatural humans, then gave rise to cults and their cultures and religions and their dogma and power and excess and tribalism and colonialism and vilification and conflict and wars and unifications and schisms and reunifications and revolutions and and conquests and corruption and stagnation and collapse, repeated thousands of times, all over the world, everywhere humans go.

This may seem like a big discovery now, but realize as you dig into linguistics, you will find yourself in a bottomless pit. Our languages are enormous graveyards FULL of the rubble of our species scattered remains of past attempts and short successes and big failures at civilization.

The greek and judeo-christian gods you mention are a couple very tiny pieces of the whole picture, whose importance may not be any more significant 7000 years from now then any of humanitys much more successful and longer-lived gods and religions from 7,000 years ago are today.

It's a big, old world, OP, and humans have packed a lot of fucking around into a short amount of time.

Why are Confucian societies so non-religious nowadays? At first, I guessed communism, but it turns out that Nice Korea and Japan are also pretty non-religious. They constantly rank low in religiosity polls, and are among the few societies where it isn't correlated with wealth.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

― C.G. Jung

Form is the shape, visual appearance, constitution or configuration of an object. In a wider sense, the form is the way something is or happens.

function
1. The action or purpose for which a person or thing is suited or employed, especially:

Religion
A religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence.[note 1] Many religions have narratives, symbols, and sacred histories that aim to explain the meaning of life

I had an alternative art picture of mickey mouse baseball batting someone with other iconic corporate deities and gestalts fighting but it's too big to post

chinese people aren't interested in religion for the same reason capitalists aren't happy about mcdonald's or some other corporation

it's a baseline substrate and works to disillusion people from the concept altogether and the more this happens the more people give up trying to find meaning in things (it's a good political tactic for control)

of course this means that usually the only people who keep going are either obsessed with meaning and will latch on to the first thing they see whether that's a suicide cult or something glorious like anarchist movement (planting trees is super serious revolutionary work)

the small groups raise hell, irk and scare the masses and then they get a sudden impetus to try to find out more, the powers that be have to work extra hard to give explanations as to what happened, this however sparks interest again in investigation of events and meaning in a bit of the population that had previously given up and a chain reaction ensues

this continues until people get sick of it and a reverse process sort of emerges

so what I'm saying is, it's so unquestioned as the way of life noone needs a fantastic imagination of it being better than it actually is

however that's partially because they don't know of a better life, I can't speak for china but there's elements of this that are growing more and more common in japan's artwork
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I want a good overview book of the Crimean War but it doesn't really seem like there is a canon account of this historical period. Figes has written one, but he's a rather modern historian. All the published histories of the Crimean War seem pretty modern.

What do you think of Orlando Figes? Is he a solid, dependable writer? Do you think that he would show a pro-British bias in this book?

oh I actually like it, I'll check out "ideas and opinions" sometime, I mostly checked out quotes in wikiquote and other quote sites a couple years ago on various characters/people/figures/whatever, so I'm half-confident I've got the right impression but I'm definitely interested in getting it right

anyways, the "tell me this isn't real" thing was actually me saying "pinch me am I dreaming?" I'd been aware of some brutal behaviour by israel to gaza for some time and was happy to finally find some information that puts zionism on the backfoot through appeals to authority, as well as examples of people who didn't hold to it's views that it would claim to represent

There is no diffrence between the origins of what is now likud, and litteral facism, this is a fact.

>It is almost certain that the signer was not "the" Albert Einstein.

if it was not, then it echos his known sentiments exactly.

Zionism is litterally Jewish National Socialism, while the left zionism might have been far more on the socialist side, the founders of likud's only critique against actual Fascism was "it was against the jews, otherwise we'd support it",

Einstien was a labor zionist, that broke pretty early against zionism as a whole, for obvious reasons.

>>14266I always find it really weird that Americans like JFK so much. What exactly did he do that was so different?

He wasn't interested in social reform - Johnson did that.

He wasn't interested in rational diplomacy, and pushed any aggressive angle he could in foreign policy, including violating missile treaties, which is playing with fire, and pursuing an escalation in the war in Vietnam to defend a nasty like dictatorship in the south.

Also, he was corrupt as hell, and only got into politics because of his family ties, which included a lot of mob money and union bribing, etc.

I may have been swallowing bullshit (its possible) but I haven't heard anything good about him. It seems at least possible that he is only applauded out of the idea that he died tragically young. "Oh, he would have done such great things!" Yeah, like what? We could speculate anything here.

I agree with most of the rest of your post though. Just the JFK bit that got me itchy.

but everyone loves griffith! or at least used to
he's got a shining city on a hill and doesn't afraid of monsters in the wilderness

nevermind that he's causing the problems half the time, and you know that kind of annoying JFK conspiray quote post? I did some research and found that he wasn't talking about some illuminati conspiracy blah blah blah but rather communist teachers

It would depend on the era of Roman history in which you would be talking about. This however is a good question. I'm never come across an actual answer to this myself. I just know that throughout majority of their timeline majority of the people under Roman control spoke Greek. Even when Rome was still just a kingdom on seven hills.

>>14393Part of a single lecture that covers Marx's writing in the context of Russian literature, out of a total of 26 lectures (the rest of which don't cover Marx's writing), constitutes "teaching Marx?"

Normally when you say "teaching X" that means X is the focus, not some ancillary topic that's covered as part of a ranging discourse on a wide variety of topics.

so I found out that thomas paine had a sister that died as a child, is consistently shown with scissors, and seems to be a tailor

"At the age of 13, he was apprenticed to his stay-maker father. Paine researchers contend his father's occupation has been widely misinterpreted to mean that he made the stays in ladies' corsets, which likely was an insult later invented by his political foes."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA9ctDfWyOohere's the reds (socialists, who don't belong in the yellow area - yellow meaning liberalism), america, and fascism (the grey guy who was wearing a brown cloak and hiding like he was an afrikaaner), I don't particularly agree with this propaganda but I found it insightful into the phenomenon of colours as references

the third one shits class war, see political colours and note references and viewpoints, for instance the courtroom in the dark knight rises has a certain french revolution feel to it
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attack on titan's a great example of the concept with giant people eating others, and if you feel like it, there's a great intro at least to tower of god on the matter, since class war is about dealing with those who rule above you and in essence climbing the tower is in the comic, and the first bit is similar to gurren lagann in a sense too although they have differences, the first thing about class war you have to understand is that for the people who rise up, they start fighting because they feel suffocated by the impositions of their masters

http://www.spunk.org/library/cartoons/wildcat/index.htmlah, I found a few wildcat cartoons, simple is good for an opening on a complex subject, I'm not talking about simplifying the concept entirely, but rather begin with a general premise
http://www.spunk.org/library/cartoons/wildcat/sp000574.gifthis is a *particularly* good one since phrases like "no war but class war" find themselves mostly supported by the anarchists, and politics, personal matters and philosophical matters all are important under a mature understanding of society in their view from what I've seen

oh and I think I see calvin from calvin and hobbes in the picture, calvin, and hobbes the actual people might be a good reference point too, it might be good to reference a game on the matter, mass effect 3 certainly has aspect but it's a bit pre-blowup as a cultural addition, fight club's a pseudo example if you talk about the movie, but you could bring it up, and reference the beginning part about the boring job, consumerism etc etc etc, or the matrix with the leech machines, the animatrix had a good one about class war through that one short about blowing up the UN or something with an apple

Alexander was one of the four greatest military geniuses in history; Caesar was much more of a political manipulator than a soldier, and his conquests came from the fact that he was fortunate enough to command Roman legionaries, the finest army the world had yet seen. Caesar was not worthy to have carried Alexander's gloves.

both were great at what they did, caesar was more political and alexander was more militaristic, but alexander had some serious issues with maintenance as did caesar, both possibly got themselves killed by the people "on their side" because of it

if they teamed up, caesar would enjoy being associated with alexander the great who would receive many many troops over and above what he could have gotten for himself and for a longer period of time, don't forget that alexander was well aware of how to engage in larger overall strategies while caesar was envious of him and despaired at not having done anything at the same age alexander died since the latter had "conquered the world"

just fucking admit it, it's patton and ike without montgomery shitting things up